Healing Employment: RETENTION & DEVELOPMENT – Culture is King!

The final installment in an eight-part series, “Employment is Broken”, by Kim Shepherd, CEO, and Jeff Bloch, CMO, Decision Toolbox

You’ve followed our creative tips for successfully attracting, selecting, interviewing, hiring and onboarding employees in today’s challenging marketplace. So, now that they’re in, how do you KEEP THEM?

Many organizations fall down in the final stages of the employment process – RETENTION & DEVELOPMENT – by neglecting to nurture and engage their employees and view them as candidates to be continually courted and mentored. This is really the point where cultural glue kicks in. Cultural glue cements your corporate culture, permeates your entire organization, can make a good team great, and holds teams together during tough times.

Creating Cultural Glue

Below are a few creative examples for developing sticky cultural glue in your company, and making it an inspired workplace where employees are “switched on” and no one wants to leave:

Flip the hierarchy – empower employees, respect their time, encourage their ideas.

Leverage fresh eyes – ask new hires to point out processes in your company that don’t make sense – because they probably don’t!

Keep employees engaged and looking forward – change up employee work routines with new challenges every 18 months – ask them what their goals should be.

Pods, Tiger Teams, Tsunami Planning – group employees into Pods of 4-7 each, ask them to meet monthly for intensive Tiger Team meetings where they develop solutions to existing problems or challenges. Ask these same Pods to come together quarterly for Tsunami Planning meetings where they solve problems that haven’t happened yet!

Celebrate boo-boos – share mistakes openly and without judgment to help others avoid repeating the same boo-boos.

Creating cultural glue takes real thought, complete buy-in from the top, and constant focus to be kept in place, but it’s well worth the effort. Make your organization a place where employees want to STAY and can GROW. Remember, creativity is the difference between managing and leading others!

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